Quick Kiosk

By: Eric Schultz

Purpose

This is a quick and dirty internet kiosk tutorial. It should work rather well for most disto's.

Back Story

I have some clients that need internet kiosks with moderatly trusted users. Think of businesses with lunchroom computers. Locking them down is not a priority, so I do NOT reccommend this config for public consumption. It should however give you the basics of creating a Kiosk on any disto.

How to do it

This is one configuration, but they all have the following requirements:

Auto-Logon/Run X11

Run Firefox

Optionally run a window manager.

Restart the whole thing if firefox closes.

Pre-requisites

For my install I'm using CentOS 5.x Not that it really matters. What you really need is:

X11 or Xorg (an X windowing system.)

init

firefox

su

startx

Configuration

Install your system/prereq's

Create Your user to run as adduser kiosk

(Optional) add a password to the account passwd kiosk

Create a .xinitrc file in their home directory with the following contents:

That's it, basically we tell init to run "startx" as user kiosk. Then we configure the .xinitrc to run our window manager and use firefox as the shell (so it shuts down and restarts if firefox ever closes.)

Notes

If you are on a newer version of RHEL or CentOS, you may have to edit /etc/pam.d/xserver Set it to look something like: